No question in my mind, there's no question that the vitality of film these days is in the hands of Spanish storytelling: layered narrative, magical deviations from causality, sex as physics. The beauty of woman and places deeply rooted to the elegance of understanding.
There are narrative notions and cinematic qualities being nurtured in this broad community that are worth nurturing by us through appreciation. Here's a project that when you sum it all up is a dreadful movie, but it knows what it is about in terms of some intelligent ideas. It just didn't have the talent to match those ideas.
Here's the deep spine which is attempted: Pérez-Reverte writes mystery stories in a magical realism tradition. His device is usually to play between the happening of a thing and the representation of that happening in a book or painting. The idea is to fold his representation (his book) into the story, reaping all sorts of storytelling advantages.
Once these layers are established, he can jump in and out of various levels, and so can we as readers and some of the main characters as they develop insight. Layers are narrative layers, story threads, time, and almost always abstraction layers in terms of creating events and creating laws behind those events.
But the books themselves have problems. The ideas in their construction are a whole lot more engaging than the books themselves. The actual skill at storytelling just isn't masterful enough to control, channel and exploit these conceptual tides that have been unleashed.
One of his books was made into a film by a true master filmmaker, Polanski, and starred someone who knows that rare trick of layered or folded acting, where you inhabit more than one layer at a time. You had to work at it, but "Ninth Gate" really is as good as its ideas, and the ideas are in that film are both richer and crisper than in the source book.
And now we have this film of another of Pérez-Reverte's works. A simpler book in key ways.
One change it makes is to relocate the story to Barcelona and Gaudi's architecture. He is our most "folded" architect, and that change shows some real understanding of what is at stake. The filmmaker here is the guy who best exploited the environmental fabric of New Orleans to transform a simple story into a pretty interesting film in "The Big Easy."
For some reason, he is unable to do the same here. I think he could have if he had more time to get into the rhythm of the place, which is less hedonistic than New Orleans but more achingly romantic; more poundingly African under a sunny, slightly mechanical nonchalance. The project could have used this, and it was in his power, but it eludes us this time.
And that lack of control extends to more mundane production elements. The balance between realism and theatrical stereotypes/architypes was lost, probably unachievable with this cast.
The cast centers on Kate Beckinsale as our surrogate detective, who really is alluring, and in precisely the way the project demands: physically, she is made here as befitting of the place: sloppy, casual (unshaven pits), boyish face, innocent questioner on the surface -- deeply sexual and possibly powerful underneath. But she couldn't deliver that last part, the power part. Indeed, any emotion is amateurish. I haven't really paid much attention to her later work. I think it about the same.
So. What we have is a parcel of really great ideas. Important, central ones if you love movies and seriously use them in building a life and life awareness. These are all here, but mostly implicit. You have to almost ignore the movie to see them.
But along the way, you get a pretty girl, the most intriguing city on the planet, and a painting that is worthy of its role.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
